The party of Poland's prime minister Jaroslaw
Kaczynski is, from the evidence of the immediate pre-election opinon surveys, unlikely to emerge victorious in the parliamentary elections of 21 October 2007. Even if it does not, the appropriate frontpage headline in Le
Monde in the aftermath might be a variant of its post-9/11 declaration of solidarity: "We
are all Poles now".

The global drama
and the human damage of the two situations may be incomparable but the sense of engagement and
confusion is not. Europe in these tense pre-election days in indeed painfully
asking: what's the matter with Poland? Citizens of many countries In western
Europe are becoming as acquainted with the bizarre circumstances of Polish
politics as are their new neighbours from the large, mainly young Polish
diaspora.

The prospect of
Jaroslaw Kaczynski's Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law & Justice / PiS) winning a parliamentary
majority, two years after it took office in the aftermath of the elections of
September 2005, makes many people outside and inside Poland uneasy about the
future of democracy in central Europe. In this period, the Kaczynski government
- part of a structure of power which includes Jaroslaw's twin-brother Lech as president of Poland - has earned the disapproval of many critics: from
international watchdog organisations (over its attacks on the independent
judiciary and the central bank, and its infringement of the rights of ethnic
and sexual minorities) to local journalists and civil-society groups (over its
politicisation of state institutions and curtailment of the media's
independence).

The Kaczyński
administration's efforts to centralise power have had damaging effects in the
public and political culture as well as on social institutions. The everyday language of politics has become
full of confrontation, recrimination, and accusation. In the words of the
veteran dissident and forensic critic of the government, Adam Michnik, the
Kaczynski coalition has employed a peculiar mix of the conservative rhetoric of
George W Bush and the authoritarian political practice of Vladimir Putin. This
trademark style - polarising, provocative attention-seeking - has contributed
to Poland's effective (agreement on the reform treaty on 18-19 October notwithstanding)
isolation in the European Union.

In this sense,
the election-eve moment in 2007 looks even bleaker compared with 2005. The electoral victory of a populist party is bad luck for any
democracy. But the re-election of a populist government - and more, of a
government widely credited with a disastrous performance - would feel like
more than bad luck or even bad taste. It would be a bad omen, and a new game,
for Poland and perhaps for Europe as whole.

What, then, is
going on? Is Poland moving back to the 1930s, when democracy was weak,
nationalism was strong and people looked for saviours? Will Jaroslaw
Kaczynski's electoral success inspire a new populist wave in the region? Will
Viktor Orban be encouraged to move further to the right in Hungarian politics,
and Slovakia's soft populists shift further in a chauvinist direction? Is this
period witnessing the emergence of "Weimar" in central Europe?

The Weimar phantom

In the discourse
of European liberals especially, the Polish populist right has acquired the
features of what Umberto Eco calls "eternal fascism" in civilian clothes. This
"Ur-fascism" has six main characteristics:

* a cult of
tradition and rejection of modernisation

* irrationalism
and anti-intellectualism

* an appeal to
the frustrated middle class

* an obsession
with conspiracy, anti-Semitism and anti-pluralism

* violent
anti-liberalism.

The raw list
makes clear that, as serious as the situation in Poland is, the comparison with
Weimar Germany is intellectually misleading and morally questionable.

In present
central Europe, unlike Europe in the 1930s, there is no ideological alternative
to democracy. The economies of the region are not stagnating but booming;
standards of living are rising and unemployment is declining. The streets of
Budapest and Warsaw today are floating on a tide not of ruthless paramilitary
formations in search of a final solution but of restless consumers in search of
a final sale. The widespread populist rhetoric is not matched by populist
policies - at least in the economic sphere, where (in Poland and Slovakia, for
example) the governments' approach is similar to that of their liberal
predecessors.

In fact, Jaroslaw
Kaczynski's economic policy is notable by its absence: what he has instead is
an anti-corruption policy. He and his PiS seem to believe that the "reform" Poland
needs amounts to arresting some of the rich and the powerful (preferably in
front of the TV cameras). This government-by-spectacle reveals the source of
the PiS's "success": capturing the imagination of the losers of the transition
without threatening the interests of the new middle class. But it also
indicates where the heart of the current political turmoil in the region lies:
not in the strength of the right (whose support barely exceeds more than 10% of
eligible votes) but in the political impotence of the liberals.

The question that
should leave liberals from Szczecin to Santander sleepless is not "why is
populism on the rise?" but "why is there is no substantial anti-Kaczynski
mobilisation in Poland?"

The troubles of transition

What turned
Polish liberals into intellectual and political heroes in the 1980s was their anti-communist anti-politics. At the
core of their failure today is their post-communist
anti-politics. By presenting their policies not so much as "good" ones but
as necessary ones, not as "desirable" but as "rational", liberal elites - in
power, and now out of it - left society no acceptable way to protest or express
dissatisfaction. The result is that liberalism has become the identical twin of
the status quo - and this makes it defenceless against the attack of the
Kaczynski twins.

Among openDemocracy
many articles on Poland's politics and governance:

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski, "The Polish dictionary" (22 August 2007)It is the
ambiguous nature of the post-1989 transition - rather than liberal ideology per se - that is at the centre of the
current revolt against liberalism in central Europe. In historical perspective,
the transition was D-Day for central Europe. Post-communist societies did it
all - peacefully transforming the communist system, building democratic and
market institutions, producing economic wealth and - finally, in 2004 and 2007
- joining the European Union.

At the same time,
many lives were destroyed and many hopes were betrayed in the time of
transition. By the late 1990s, the typical Polish suicide-victim was not a
teenager in an existential crisis but a married man in his early 40s living in
one of the myriad small towns and villages where state firms and farm
bankruptcies combined with the collapse of the old welfare state to produce a
particularly searing kind of despair. The fact that the major winners of the
transition were the educated and well-connected members of the old nomenklatura only drained the transition
of moral acceptability.

The original sin
of the post-communist democracies lay in the circumstances of their victory:
one that belonged to the anti-egalitarian consensus of both the communist elite
and the anti-communist counter-elite. In the complex transition dance,
ex-communists were anti-egalitarian because of their interests, while liberals
were anti-egalitarian because of their anti-communism.

The troubled
child of this union, visible in Poland today, is not post-communist pathology
but a profound transformation in the nature of liberal democracies in Europe
(and not only in Europe). Poland, a pioneer of the transition in 1989 and
after, is once again in the vanguard: it is revealing that the cold-war liberal
democracies of western Europe can no longer serve as a model for central
Europe.

No choice, but a voice

In the new
environment of global economic competition and an integrated European market,
economic decision-making has in practice become disconnected from the reality
of electoral politics. The demise of the welfare state has eroded the
foundations of the classic, post-1945 liberal democracies. This process has a
particular configuration in central Europe, where (as David Ost argues) the
post-transition weakness of the labour-force contributed to a situation where
emerging class conflicts became articulated as conflicts over identity rather
than interests; this reinforced an illiberal political culture that haunted the
region's democratisation process. The logic, in Ost's view, is that
democratically minded pro-market reformers who wish to avoid illiberal outcomes
should have supported the mobilisation of anger around class (not ethnic, national
or minority-group) conflict.

Instead,
post-communist liberals adopted a strategy of demobilising society in order to
ease the institutionalisation of the market. This, the prioritisation of
capitalism-building over democracy-building, is at the heart of the current
rise of democratic illiberalism in central Europe. Liberals succeeded in
marginalising and excluding anti-capitalist discourse as a preventive measure,
but at a cost: the opening of space for political mobilisation around symbolic
and identity issues. This created the conditions for their own political
defeat.

The political
dialectic of the transition was a double-whammy to rationalism. First, the more
rational the economic policies became, the more irrational were the electoral
politics; the more liberal ideas and practices advanced, the more the
vulnerability of liberal parties increased. Second, this exclusion of economic
decision from democratic process combined with new trends - a changing
media-politics relationship and the ascendancy of a bold popular culture - to
undermine the rationalist foundation of liberal policies.

These profound
changes in the public sphere mean that many of the young Poles who (according to opinion
surveys) are massively against the policies and values represented by the
Kaczynski twins will not turn out to vote against them: they simply will turn
them off. In the choice between what Albert O Hirschmann defines as "voice" (an
attempt to reform the system) and "exit" (the effort to escape it), the
majority of post-communist citizens go for exit. What makes them
cynical about participation is that they experienced "transition democracies"
as regimes where voters could change governments
but could not change policies. (As
the pop collaborators Maxim + Skin sing: "we
don't have a choice but we still have a voice".)

Thus, the
liberals' strategy of depoliticising society provides the answer to the
"sleepless in Szczecin" question about the absence of anti-Kaczynski mobilization
in Poland. Poland's membership of the European Union also contributes to the
new anti-politics of central Europe's middle classes: "why bother to vote, when
we are already in the EU?" is their common wisdom. These days, voting is the
business of the losers; the winners have business.

In the 1930s,
only a few chose to defend democracy because the many lived with the illusion
that a better world is possible "under communists or fascists". Today in
Poland, only a few choose to vote because the majority believes that change
"for good or for bad" is not possible.

The heart of Europe, again

The key to a
proper understanding of the nature of the current crisis in central Europe in
general and Poland in particular may be not Weimar Germany and 1933, but West Germany and 1968.

In 1968, as
today, a social crisis arrived after two decades of successful economic
recovery and a period of amnesia about the past. The turmoil was unexpected and
frightening. The crisis of democracy was rooted not in the failure of
democratic institutions but in the success of the project of modernisation and
democratisation of post-1945 West Germany.

Then, as now,
there was talk about the hollowness of democratic institutions and the need for
moral revolution; in Germany then as in Poland now, there were appeals for a
"new republic" and appeals to discard the politics of soulless pragmaticism;
then, as now, there was a major transformation in the cultural and
geopolitical context; then, as now, the word "populism" was in the air and
people demanded more direct democracy.

Then too, as
now, there was an obsession with "authenticity". Student-radicals fought then
against the lack of authenticity of bourgeois society, conservative populists
fight today against the lack of authenticity in the liberal elites.
Student-radicals then were obsessed with the hidden power of the capitalist
corporation; the new Polish radicals are obsessed with the over-powerful uklad.

But here, the
similarities end. Then it was the young that revolted; now it is the old. 1968
allowed the young to "consume" the revolutionary experience that led to the
revolution in consumption practices. The current "populist revolution" is
shaped by conservative sensibilities. What the new self-proclaimed
"revolutionaries" in central Europe fear is not the authoritarianism of the
state but the excesses of postmodern culture and the collapse of traditional
values. They are nostalgic, not utopian; defensive, not visionary.

In 1968 the
spirit of the time was individualistic, emancipatory and libertarian. The
"masses" were demanding participation and voice. Students spent sleepless
nights discussing the problems of society. This is not the case today. Now,
unlike then, the challenge of the system is coming not from the left but from
the right; the new "utopia" is not global solidarity but national exceptionalism.
What conservative populists demand is not a voice but a national leader.

The
revolutionaries of 1968 had passion for "the other", those who are not like us;
the populists of today have passion for those who are like us, for their own
community. In a sense the populist revolution in central Europe today is a
revolt against the values, sensibilities, symbols and the elites of 1968. In
the modern age, nothing is more revolutionary than what only yesterday seemed the
height of reaction.

What makes the
populist revolt today appear like a non-identical twin of the student
revolution of 1968 is that both moments mark not the death of democracy but its
profound transformation. In each case what is at stake is renegotiating the
relationship not simply between liberalism and democracy but between capitalism
and democracy.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski could yet (as the late-campaign opinion polls indicate) lose power in the aftermath of the election, and the
political history of post-communist populism could yet end in bathos and banality. In that event, the history books may relegate this period to a footnote: "In the first decade of the
20th century, several populist parties in central Europe enjoyed a transient
victory. They succeeded in mobilising the anger of vulnerable and ageing
societies threatened by social and cultural insecurity. But the populist
governments soon lost power and fell victim to their own conspiratorial fantasies."

But even with such an outcome, we should still try to answer the question "what's
the matter with Poland?" if we want to understand "what's the matter with
Europe's liberalism and democracy?"

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